Ghost ship said to be in Davy Jones’ locker

“A ghost ship carrying nothing but disease-ridden cannibal rats could be about to make land on Britain’s shore, experts have warned.”

No, that’s not a tagline from an upcoming shock film. It’s a headline from famed British newspaper The Independent.

Fortunately for the good people of England, a follow-up headline days later was more benevolent:

“Ghost ship Lyubov Orlova sinks in Atlantic Ocean.”

Well, that’s the hope, anyway.

The Irish Coast Guard said Norway, Iceland and Britain agreed that the ship has sunk in the Atlantic Ocean.

Chris Reynolds from the Irish Coast Guard told the Irish Independent: “Our belief is that it has more than likely sunk, given the storms that have gone through the region.”

The boat in question is the Soviet cruise ship Lyubov Orlova, which hadn’t been heard from in a year, shortly after the abandoned ship was cut loose from a tug line and went adrift.

Recent storms sent the 1976-built Lyubov Orlova back into the public eye, specifically that of Great Britain, where it was feared the boat would end up.

So, how did this million-dollar, 1,420-ton cruise liner go from being a transporter of Russian elite to the polar regions to a permanent resident of Davy Jones’ locker?

After Canadian authorities seized the craft due to her owner’s alleged $250,000 in debts, seas peaking at 18 feet snapped her towline while she was being taken to the Dominican Republic for scrapping. Canadian authorities reportedly captured it later, dragged it out to international waters and let it loose.

The ship’s crew, unpaid for months, wisely abandoned the ship before she was towed out to sea.

And what about those pesky cannibal rats? The National Post reported that the Lyubov Orlova sat in port for more than two years in Newfoundland, “virtually guaranteeing” the ship acquired a rat infestation. After a nearly year adrift with no food, many British media outlets believe that the rats may have turned on each other in order to survive.

Perhaps the most interesting question is how the 720-foot Lyubov Orlova could go missing for so long.

Both a salvage hunter and the Irish Coast Guard tried to find the ocean liner a slew of times last year to no avail.

But that’s why it’s called a ghost ship.

Ghost ships like Lyubov Orlova aren’t all that rare. In fact, her story is relatively banal compared to some of the more spooky incidents that have transpired over time. In the last 15 years, sailors have come across at least seven of these abandoned ships, with some crew disappearances labeled as unexplainable.

• The Mary Celeste — the original ghost ship — was discovered in 1872 unmanned and apparently abandoned (the one lifeboat was missing, along with its crew of seven.) The weather was fine and her crew had been experienced and capable seamen.

• The disappearance of 25 people aboard the MV Joyita, a virtually unsinkable vessel found adrift in the South Pacific in 1955. A subsequent inquiry found the vessel was in a poor state of repair, but determined the fate of passengers and crew to be “inexplicable on the evidence submitted at the inquiry”.

• In the last decade, the fate of the crews of a trio of vessels found off the Australian coast — the High Aim 6, the Jian Seng and the Kaz II — have been left largely unexplained.

The High Aim 6 left the port of Liuchiu in southern Taiwan in October 2002, and was then found without its crew, drifting in Australian waters, in January 2003. The owner of the ship spoke last with the captain in December 2002.

The tanker Jian Seng was found off the coast of Weipa, Queensland, Australia in March. Its origin or owner could not be determined, and its engines had been inoperable for some time.

The Kaz II, dubbed “the ghost yacht”, was found drifting 88 miles off the northern coast of Australia in April 2007. The fate of her three-man crew remains unknown, and the mysterious circumstances in which they disappeared have been compared to that of the Mary Celeste. When rescuers boarded her, the engine was running, a laptop was running, the radio and GPS were working and a meal was set to eat.